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April 1, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:33
April 1, 2016, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I don't know what to do here today, folks.
I don't know what to do.
My buddies over at the Fox News channel, the all-star panel there on the special report with Britt Baer.
They misunderstood.
They misunderstood what I said.
They said, I don't know what to do about this.
Should I ignore it?
Should I talk about it?
Should I move?
I don't know what to do about it.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
They did.
They did.
They misunderstood me.
Sounds like they, not on purpose, sounds like they really didn't understand.
I realized you had to listen a whole hour and a half to put it all in context, but still.
So I don't know what to do.
The rule of thumb is you just ignore this stuff and move on.
Well, I don't know what to do, so I'm going to think about it.
Hi, folks.
How are you?
Great.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, Open Line Friday, wrapping up another big week of broadcast excellence.
It is a delight to have you here.
Even those threatening you're never going to be here again.
It's great to have you here.
Telephone number 800.
Okay, that's it.
That's it.
I mean it now.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program at the email address, LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
What the heck?
Let's just go ahead and try to deal with this.
Let me ask a question.
I'm going to ask Mr. Snurdy.
He's normally a sycophant, but I want you to not be a sycophant here.
I want you to tell me, you listen to the whole program is you listen to this first hour where I delve deeply into, did I not characterize what happened with Trump on MSNBC and Matthew's whole abortion as an utter disaster for the party, not just Trump, but for the party as it relates to the election in November.
Did I not point out how the Democrat Party was in the midst of a, I think they're depressed out there.
Now, Hillary is losing to Bernie in New York.
Did you see those numbers?
Or is it a national poll?
The national poll.
Even better.
Hillary's losing to Bernie.
Hillary cracking up to a Greenpeace representative asking her questions about fossil fuels and whether she's taking money from big ore.
Hey, Greenpeace.
She's taking money from everybody.
Everybody owns her.
You should get in line.
So my point was, the Democrat Party, the voter turnout of their primaries is way, way down.
There's no excitement.
There's absolutely nothing dramatic.
Even the race between Hillary and Crazy Bernie, because everybody in the Democratic Party assumes that when it's all over, Hillary's the nominee by de facto, and nobody's excited about that.
And here comes this thing with Trump on MSNBC, and this is the kind of thing that can totally energize a Moriban campaign.
And I went to great pains to explain yesterday here that to me, what all of this ultimately should be about is defeating them, defeating the Democrats, defeating Hillary.
Folks, we got one shot at this.
You know, I have spent a lot of time talking about it.
I try to avoid being repetitive sometimes.
Other times I realize it's necessary to keep pounding the same things.
We have undergone seven years here of an administration which is transforming, undermining almost every institution and tradition that was founded and grew that defined this nation's greatness.
We are also in the midst of an overwhelming demographic shift.
I just saw something last night.
The Pew Research Center has done a really involved demographic survey and study and has come up with some predictions about the demographic shifts that are going to happen in this country between now and 2050.
And it is going to be in terms of every demographic that you want to discuss, it's going to be an entirely different country.
It's going to be an entirely different country from what it was founded as.
And the only thing that can maintain this country and see to it that your kids and your grandkids grow up into a country such as the one you did, just like you did.
The only thing is principles That we have had handed down to us since our founding being maintained ideas, principles, philosophies that unite all these different groups.
Because this demographic survey is pretty telling if all of these different demographic groups balkanize, you can say goodbye.
I mean, there's always going to be an American, don't misunderstand, but it's not going to be the America that was founded.
That's the objective of this current Democrat Party is to rid all evidence of the founding of this country as much as they can, including as much of the Constitution as they can get away with.
This election is key to me.
I have made no bones about it.
I have not hidden.
I've not withheld my belief that the most destructive force in the country today is liberalism, the left, the worldwide left.
But it's focused here.
The Democrat Party is where it resides, and it's in every one of their special interest groups.
And they are doing everything they can to undermine everything they believe an unjust and illegitimate majority founded.
And they are succeeding.
We got the new unemployment numbers today, and everybody's clapping their hands, unemployment rate 5.0, another 215,000 jobs, big whoop.
To get back to where we were before Obama took office, we need to be creating 500 to 600,000 jobs a month, not 200,000.
We're not even, we haven't even reached replacement levels yet in terms of what we lost.
But the telling figure remains, the labor force participation rate, 93 million Americans not working.
I don't care what you want to jimmy the number with, the unemployment number, 5%, it's meaningless.
You simply can't have a growing economy.
You cannot have GDP.
You cannot have economic output.
You cannot have economic growth that creates this rising tide that lifts all boats.
You simply cannot have a society with an opportunity for an improved standard of life with this many people not working.
It simply isn't possible.
And this many people not working is exactly what the forces arrayed against us choose.
It's exactly what they want.
Every one of those 93 million, the vast majority of them, are needy, nevertheless.
They have to live.
They have to eat.
They have to drive.
They have to watch TV.
They have to make cell calls.
And if the government provides all of that and more, hunky-dory for them.
But that doesn't lead to economic growth.
No economic growth leads to very, very little economic opportunity for the middle class, which is what this country has always been.
That's been the American dream.
And all of this is by design.
You know, I look at these demographic figures and I look at the way millennials, they don't know what's happening.
They think they do.
And what they're dealing with is this shifting demographic.
There is bitterness and anger in the millennial group over different things that you and I are bitter about, but there still is bitterness.
What they have concluded is that the accident of their birth explains their plight, meaning they just had the great misfortune of being born after peak America.
It's just happenstance.
They just happen to be born after America's best days.
They haven't the slightest idea because nobody has taken the time to try to tell them because the primary opposition party has not taken the time to try to tell them.
They don't realize that it's not just America's best days are behind us and it's a quirk of fate.
They have not been told that this is all happening because of specific policies implemented by President Obama and the Democrat Party.
That's why America is in decline.
We can't afford four more years of this because four more years of this equals a generation of it.
The ground that would be lost in four more years of Hillary Clinton or Bernie for what I mean, it doesn't matter.
The ground that would be lost, not unrecoverable, but we're not talking about the opportunity that we have now.
We've got to stop this.
And so everything that happens on this program, while you might have to wade through it to get to it, because I assume you listen every day, and I assume you understand some things and remember some things.
I assume you listen here in context.
Everything that happens on this program is designed, is purposed, let's put it this way, is purposed to illustrate that the problems we face are really not found in the Republican Party, except that part of the party that is the establishment that doesn't care to fight back against any of this.
The Republican Party that even now is salivating or turning over their own convention so they can, Karl Roves admitted it, a fresh face.
They've admitted it now.
The RNC, Rynch Priebus, they've admitted it now.
They're looking at the convention, told you, they're looking at the convention as an opportunity to get their person, one of their people from the establishment installed in there, rather than Cruz or rather than Trump.
They have shown, folks, the Republican establishment has shown they're not interested in pushing back against any of this.
They've shown they're not interested in stopping any of this.
The last seven years, intelligence guided by experience.
We know we have seven years of no pushback.
We have seven years of not even attempting to.
In fact, we have seven years of we should be crossing the aisle more.
We have seven years of hearing we need to reach out, work with the Democrats, we need to show the American people we can govern, we can make Washington work.
No, no, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite.
This election is really too crucial.
I don't control, I have no control over who the nominee is going to be, despite what many people think, I don't.
And there isn't anybody else in media who does either.
Like Rumsfeld once said, you go to war with the army, you got.
You can sit there and pretend it's not as good or whatever, but you go to war with the army, you got.
And they really jumped on it for that, by the way.
The drive-bys.
So whenever anything happens out there that I think is going to continue to mischaracterize, damage the entire opposition to the Democrats, which is us, whether you want to call it the Republican Party, conservative movement, whatever.
Whenever anything happens, like Trump on MSNBC and this abortion debacle with Chris Mitt, when that happens, I go into damage control for the sake of the November election, for the sake of preserving the opportunity we have to beat these people and roll them back.
And what happened was a replay of Romney and the contraception remark, which a question which led to the war on women.
You can disagree with, of course, this is not quite the same thing.
The effect is the same thing.
We've revitalized and energized a moribund, asleep, depressed Democrat Party.
We have done it on the basis of a hypothetical question.
And this is where my good friends at the Fox News channel take issue with me, particularly Dr. Krauthammer said that I was defending Trump.
And Charles Land of Washington was defending Trump on the basis that he was asked a hypothetical question.
I wasn't defending Trump at all.
I was defending Trump.
I wouldn't have categorized what happened as an utter disaster.
I wouldn't have categorized it as a dire emergency.
I was not defending Trump.
I was trying to explain why Trump, you know, it's pointless to go any further with this.
I've been doing this since September, and if you don't want to understand it or accept it, I've got to start now.
He just doesn't care about this stuff.
He's got to phone this in.
And this has never been, he's never been a political animal.
He lives in an entirely different world.
He gets things done outside of politics.
He gets things done with his own way.
But now he's running for president.
That's in the political arena.
He's got to wise up and figure it all out.
And he hasn't in many ways, like how to handle a pro-abortion question or a debort and whatever question he gets about abortion.
He knows he's to say pro-life.
And after that, it's a wing and a prayer.
And it isn't going to cut it.
So when it happens, my effort's not to defend Trump.
It is to try to limit the damage.
Well, then, Rush, if you're really serious, why don't you just say that Trump should get out?
Because that's a real damage.
I know some of you shouting that right now.
If you're trying to limit the damage, why don't you tell Trump?
Told you yesterday that's not the way to do it, folks.
Everybody in the world has tried.
People endorse other people that come out condemn Trump.
All it does is cement the Trump people to him even tighter.
But again, that falls into a category of I don't endorse during primaries, and I'm not going to change the policy, and I've explained why.
The point of this is not to make excuses.
The point of this is to try to further explain what I'm about.
Sometimes I feel like I'm not alone, but in a very small club of people whose focus is beating Democrats.
I would vote for Daffy Duck before Hillary Clinton.
I would vote for anybody, but whoever.
I don't care who the Democrats nominate.
I'm not going to vote for them.
And I'm going to actively campaign against them or advise or commentate against them.
I think they pose the greatest threat to the country continuing as founded that we have faced in my lifetime.
Democrat Party has always represented that threat, but it has never been as potent as it is today.
And they're seven years into, well, they're more than seven years, but seven intense years controlling the policy implementation apparatus of this country for seven years.
They've gotten closer to their objective than ever before.
I got to take a break.
We'll come back and I guess share with you some of the sound bites from my buddies over at the Fox News channel when we get back.
So don't go away.
Hang on.
Okay, we'll start with Judge Napolitano.
Last night on special report with Brett Baer during the all-star panel, the judge made the panel.
Very cool.
So Red Bear said, okay, Judge, the real clear politics average of recent polls in Wisconsin, Ted Cruz, slightly ahead of Trump.
Trump in Washington today to meet with the RNC.
By the way, that real clear politics average might be, but, I mean, Cruz is sweeping in Wisconsin.
He's up 10 now in, I think, two different polls.
And in one of these, what is it?
The public policy polling poll, I think they're tied within margin of error.
But in another one of these polls, Cruz is beating Trump and women by like 19%.
Trump is not close in Wisconsin, according to all but one of the polls there is the point.
At any rate, Brett Baer says, okay, Judge, Trump's in Washington today, had this meeting with the RNC.
What are your thoughts?
If he truly believes this, it is so contrary to American culture, even by the fiercest of pro-life people.
It's hard to believe that he would think that this would get him any votes.
Rather, it shows a lack of serious thinking about a very, very serious topic.
I think that this statement alone, combined with his likely loss in Wisconsin, will begin the dissent of Donald Trump's popularity in the Republican primary.
Let me sum that up because the question that we edited the answer here, and he was actually being asked about Trump's comment to Chris Matthews on MSNBC, and our question here was about much larger things.
So we cut to the chase.
And the judge thinks it's over for Trump.
Now, the judge is one guy, but the judge thinks it's over.
He's not the first to say that he thinks it's over for Trump.
But his instinct is, hey, this issue, that question, that answer, just shows such a lack of serious thinking about such a very, very serious topic, meaning abortion, pro-life, how incendiary it is in presidential politics throughout American culture.
And the judge's point for Trump to appear so what?
Unprepared, so unserious in his thinking about it.
He thinks this is it.
It's the end of the line.
This is going to be the beginning of the end for Trump.
So that's just one thought.
Coming next, we have Charles Lane, who was also on the All-Star panel, followed by Dr. Krauthammer, and then a soundbite from the Today Show Today, all related to what we're talking about.
Hang in, one more obscene profit break here, and we'll get right back to it.
We're back.
Open line Friday, 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, we'll get to phone calls eventually.
Back to the Fox News special report with Brett Baer and the All-Star Panel.
By the way, the polling, David, two different polls out there that has Cruz up by 10, the Fox News, Fox Business poll, and the Marquette Law School poll.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
Did not we have a public policy polling poll yesterday showed Trump up for Cruz?
Yeah, one of them was up by one.
It's a margin of error, like 3635 or some such thing.
And then the internals show that Cruz is, well, Trump's negatives with women are just off the charts.
So Cruz was up by 19 in one of these two polls.
I forget which.
But what threw me was Brett Baer saying the real clear politics average of recent polls has Cruz slightly.
He's not slightly.
10 points is not slightly ahead.
So they must be averaging in the public policy polling poll.
But whatever.
It's a big spread.
And when you get into the internals and you find the negatives for Trump, they're pretty.
In fact, let me find something real quick here before we move on.
This also from public policy polling, these are favorable, unfavorable numbers.
Trump, 29.
These are national.
These are national numbers, favorable, unfavorable.
Trump 29, favorable, 63, unfavorable.
Ted Cruz, 30% favorable, just one point ahead of Trump unfavorable, 58% unfavorable.
Kasich, 41% favorable, 39% unfavorable.
Romney.
Don't know why Romney's in this, but he is.
23 favorable, 65 unfavorable.
Hillary, 37 favorable, 55 unfavorable.
Bernie Sanders, 41 favorable, 48 unfavorable.
You realize in this list of six candidates, Trump, Cruz, Kasich, Romney, Hillary Bernie, nobody is liked.
There isn't anybody except one candidate who has a higher favorable than unfavorable rating.
And of all people, it's Kasich.
Kasich also happens to be the one the least heard from.
So I think that's how you chalk it up.
I mean, if you want a campaign slogan for 2006, maybe everybody sucks.
There's not one other than Kasich.
Everybody is disliked by a far greater number of people than like them.
Now, we don't have numbers for whoever the Republican establishment might choose to be their nominee in a contested convention like Jeb or Paul Ryan or whoever else.
And they've made it clear that that's their, I mean, they're thinking about it.
Karl Rove has let the head out of the bag.
I mean, he's basically said it might revive our negative, unfavorable, positive numbers.
It might energize the party, get somebody in there that doesn't have all these negatives attached to it.
So clearly, look, we don't even need these people to say it.
We know they're pondering this.
We know that they are trying to come up with a way to deny either Cruz or Trump the nomination.
Okay, now back to our good buddies at the special report with Brett Baer and the Fox News channel.
This Charles Lane, Brett Baer, he's the Washington Post.
Baer says, Trump allies and supporters say that when Trump was on MSNBC, he misspoke.
He shoots him the hip all the time.
And he felt that questions are rapid fire from Chris Matthews.
And Trump was having trouble, but he straightened it out.
Trump straightened it out.
He's going to bounce right back.
So, Charles, what's your take on that?
Brush Limbaugh supplied him with an excuse, which is a kind of a strange excuse.
He was just trying to pander, is basically what Limbaugh came up with.
Nevertheless, you're right that he has always thrived off the image of somebody who's a victim of a media ganging up on him.
And so he will attempt to play with that.
On the other hand, Brett, I would say that his reaction, which was to back off and sort of correct himself several times, was an unusually defensive moment for Donald Trump.
He normally, you know, admits nothing and just presses on as before.
The mere fact that he felt he had to correct this time, that was kind of unusual.
Right.
Now, the only thing I want to address here is that I was trying to supply Trump with an excuse.
Can I remind you of what the umbrella here is?
I realize I don't every day start their program by saying, folks, here's today's objective.
And everything I say today falls underneath this objective or this umbrella.
I don't do that every day.
I just assume that with 27 years under my belt, now into our 28th year, and I assume with people knowing me, they understand where I'm headed, what I'm about, what animates me, what my objectives are.
I've made no bones about the fact I think the most destructive force that we face today is liberalism in the Democrat Party.
I realize it may be quaint to put it that way, but we've backed it up with various reasons, policies and so forth, the very things which are destroying the traditions and the institutions and the principles that founded this country.
So when this thing happens, if somebody reads what I say and doesn't hear me explain the purpose of a particular program on a particular day, the last thing I was doing was offering Trump an excuse.
The objective for me, so I don't know who's going to get this nomination.
I really don't.
And I don't think I have a thing to do with who does and who doesn't.
And I don't think anybody else does either.
The proof is Democrats would have never won an election in the last 27 years if I had the power a lot of people assigned to me.
But they have won a lot of elections.
They have won far more elections than I would ever have wanted them to.
So I don't, folks, I don't live under any illusion here.
I'm not running around with an inflated head that can't fit inside a doorway.
I'm not under any misconception about what I'm able to accomplish or do except within the confines of my career.
Whoever the nominee of this party ends up being, I want them to win because that is far more preferable to me than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or anybody else that they might nominate if they decide they don't like Hillary, if they decide she can't win.
So if they try to do their own manipulations and end up putting Joe Biden in there, I don't care who it is.
I don't want them to win.
I want the opposition to the Democrat Party to triumph and I want it to win.
And when the opposition screws up, I want to try to limit the damage of the screw-up and limit the damage of the mistake.
And this was a disaster that happened because of the subject matter.
It was designed to be a disaster.
It was designed to destroy Trump.
It was designed to take him out.
It was designed to once again do much more than that.
Matthews is a political hack like Stephanopoulos is, like they all are in the Democrat media.
And the objective for them, they never forget their objective.
Their objective is to beat us.
They want to beat us more than they want to beat ISIS.
They want to stop us more than they want to stop ISIS.
They think Trump's going to be the nominee.
They've got themselves convinced Trump's going to be the nominee.
They are doing their best to destroy who they think our nominee is going to be.
We're not.
We haven't even gotten around to helping destroy Hillary Clinton because half of us are still trying to destroy who we think is going to be our nominee.
So in that, we're on the same playing field with the Democrats.
The Democrats are trying to destroy whoever our nominee is.
They're in the process of trying to already destroy that person.
And I'm trying to stop that from happening with little I can do by limiting whatever damage might happen when somebody says something unfortunate, stupid, inexperienced, naive, whatever it is.
I'm not excusing Trump.
I was trying to mitigate the damage by explaining what I thought he might have, why he might have screwed up.
But everybody else wants to look at things like, oop, that's it, got to get rid of them.
We don't have any control over that.
And we're going to be, we already face a really precarious situation if things don't play out right.
Because depending how this happens, a bunch of cruise voters may get their noses out of joint and decide not to vote, like a number of them didn't in 2012.
And the Trumpists, the odds are they're not going to show up if they think the nomination's been taken away from Trump, if they suspect anything outside the normal Democrat process has taken place here.
And you can kiss victory goodbye if any of these things happen.
You can kiss it goodbye right now.
And all the rest of this remains an academic exercise to prove who's the smartest, who's the cleverest, who's the best conservative, who's the best moderate, who's the best this.
The war has begun, and we haven't entered it yet.
We are still in the circled firing squad phase.
And I don't like being in that phase.
So it wasn't pandering.
It wasn't an excuse.
It was an attempt to explain to people who want to support Trump why he might have screwed it up.
It was an attempt to explain to people who don't want to support Trump why it might not be what you think it is.
There might have been a reason for this happening that is short of unacceptable.
I don't know.
Maybe it's a lost cause.
And maybe I should begin every program by saying the purpose here, the purpose of this program today is to once again explain why we must beat the Democratic Party.
Everything I say today is designed to do everything we can to not damage ourselves and to end up defeating the Democratic Party.
In fact, I might even put that in a show open.
Might have Donovan recorded put it in the show open.
So there's no mistake about what's going on here.
Another quick timeout.
Hang in there, folks.
We'll be right back with much more.
Don't go away.
Bloomberg News just ran a just cleared a story, fascinating premise.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said that voters in Wisconsin are about to shift the dynamic of the Republican presidential race.
And he cites the Marquette University law school poll showing Cruz with a 10-point lead over Trump in Wisconsin.
42 delegates are up for grabs in the primary next Tuesday.
And what Walker says in the story is that a Cruz victory over Trump in Wisconsin will reset the entire race.
Said this on an interview with all due respect on the Bloomberg TV show.
He said, Ted Cruz is in this unique position to unite the party because you've got a group of the Republican electorate out there that have been in the caucuses, in the primaries who've said they've had it with Washington.
I'm fed up.
I want an outsider.
But Walker said, up until recently, I don't think there's a person out there, including all of you in the media, who would say that Ted Cruz is an outsider.
I mean, he's one of the few people I know who didn't just talk that way in a campaign.
He got to Washington, actually, oddly enough, did what he said he was going to do.
His point here is, and this, I alluded to this earlier this week.
You know, we're in a lull, folks.
We're in a lull where all we got is polls.
We have recent results, but they're now a week old.
We are in a lull.
All we've got is polling data, just like it was long before Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary happened.
And I said, when those two things happen, we've got hard results.
We've got an actual reality.
It's going to change all of this that people are flapping their gums about right now.
And that's what Walker's saying.
If Cruz wins on Tuesday, he believes that this starts a brand new slate and it resets the race and it begins the end of Trump and it sets Cruz on the way to the nomination.
That's what Scott Walker means.
He believes that Ted Cruz, with a victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday, will be in position to unite the party.
He sees a Cruz victory over Trump in Wisconsin resetting the race.
Meaning he believes that Trump losing combined with the Cruz victory changes the entire thinking, changes the momentum, totally changes the inertia.
Because he believes that a Trump defeat at this stage, when everybody, just a week ago, two weeks ago, everybody was assuming Trump had already won it.
It was in the bag.
It was just a matter of time.
Get to 1237 and that's it.
Everybody was talking, the establishment wringing their hands.
What can they do to stop it?
And Walker's point, he doesn't say all this is, I'm interpreting what he means here, that a cruise win is going to totally change this thinking that's in the bag for Trump and may, in fact, turn everything upside down.
And Trump, for the first time in the campaign since last August, might actually be looked at as somebody that's going to lose.
That's what he believes a cruise victory represents.
Do not discount what he is saying.
Do not discount what he's saying.
I think there's a and I think, well, I know it's not winners.
We're not talking about winter takeoff.
Scott Walker's not talking about delegates here.
He's talking about attitudes.
He's talking about this great, invisible force called momentum and doubt.
He's talking about some, I know it could all be upset again when we get to New York, but you can't sit there and say Trump was always going to lose Wisconsin.
He wasn't always going to lose.
That's the point.
He was going to sweep Wisconsin and everything else.
Now he's 10 points down.
The Trumpists are getting concerned.
They won't tell you so, but they have to be getting concerned.
Any normal human being would be.
This wasn't in the cards.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
So you have a guy who endorsed Cruz.
Of course he's going to take advantage of it.
He's out there.
He's putting the thought in people's heads.
You know what?
If our guy wins this, this makes us a whole new race.
I mean, this is going to start a Cruz landslide.
This is going to actually put into motion what the Cruz people have believed.
One-on-one, Cruz is going to pick up all these anti-Trump votes in the primary and just keep winning and winning and winning.
You can't blame him for trying to create that mindset, which is what he's trying to do.
Well, I didn't get a phone call in in the first hour.
Sorry about that.
I always try.
I make up for this in the next busy broadcast hour because we got a full board of people that want to weigh in.
So if you're one of them, hang on.
If you're calling, keep calling.
You'll eventually find a way in.
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